Lewiston City Hall, Courtesy Maine Historic Preservation Commission
The Future of the Manager Plan
This document is reprinted with permission from "The Manager Plan in Maine" published by the Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy. Copies of the complete book may be obtained by calling the Center at (207) 581-1646.
If the past is any indicator of the future, the manager plan likely will continue to evolve in Maine. As smaller towns grow in population and become urbanized, their needs for centralized management and organization will require modification of the traditional town meeting structure and development of a manager framework. Medium sized towns may continue to abandon the town meeting and adopt representative councils. Generally speaking, the larger the municipality, the greater a need for continuous policy leadership, centralized administration and the integration of certain functions under the authority of one individual.
The new municipal home rule law has tended to reduce the heavy reliance of many Maine municipalities upon the general law manager plan. At the local level, towns can frame, draft and adopt municipal charters, which can meet local needs better than the general law town manager enabling act. Similarly, home rule allows smaller towns to adopt the administrative assistant model. However, the revised enabling act likely will continue to be a useful device in some municipalities.
Recent town meeting abandonments, the revision of the town manager enabling act and the adoption of home rule for Maine municipalities provide the needed flexibility for further innovation and development of the manager plan. However, with these changes, the development may not be governed as much by the original theory of the manager plan as by the particular policy-making and management needs in each community.
The Maine Manager Plan itself has evolved from a rather orthodox design in the early 1970s to one that encompasses many structural variations of government and the role of the appointed, professional administrator.